Ernest Hemingway

THE GARDEN OF EDEN
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Chapter Twenty-six

THEY DRESSED ON THE BEACH and climbed up the steep trail with David carrying the bag with the beach things to where the old car was waiting in the pine woods. The got in and David drove back to the hotel in the early evening light. Catherine was quiet in the car and to anyone passing them they might have been returning from any afternoon at one of the unfrequented beaches of the Est&el. The war ships were no longer in sight when they left the car on the driveway, and the sea beyond the pines was blue and calm. The evening was as beautiful and clear as the morning had been.

They walked down to the entrance of the hotel and David took the bag with the beach things into the storeroom and put it down.

"Let me take them," Catherine said. "They ought to go to dry."

"I'm sorry," David said. He turned at the door of the storeroom and walked out and then down to his work room at the end of the hotel. Inside the room he opened the big Vuitton suitcase. The pile of cahiers that the stories had been written in was gone. So were the four bulky envelopes from the bank that had contained the press clippings. The pile of cahiers with the narrative written in them were intact. He closed and locked the suitcase and searched all of the drawers in the armoire and searched the room. He had not believed that the stories could be gone. He had not believed that she could do it. At the beach he had known that she might have done it but it had seemed impossible and he had not really believed it. They had been calm and careful and restrained about it as you were trained to be in danger or emergency or in disaster but it had not seemed possible that it could really have happened.

Now he knew that it had happened but still thought it might be some ghastly joke. So, empty and dead in his heart, he re opened the suitcase and checked it and after he locked it he checked the room again.

Now there was no danger and no emergency. It was only disaster now. But it couldn't be. She must have hidden them someplace. They could be in the storeroom, or in their own room, or she could have put them in Marita's room. She couldn't really have destroyed them. No one could do that to a fellow human being. He still could not believe that she had done it but he felt sick inside himself when he closed and locked the door.

The two girls were at the bar when David came in. Marita looked up at him and saw how things were and Catherine watched him come in by looking at the mirror. She did not look at him, only at his reflection in the mirror.

"Where did you put them, Devil?" David asked.

She turned away from the mirror and looked at him. "I won't tell you," she said.

"I took care of them."

"I wish you'd tell me," David said. "Because I need them very much."

"No, you don't," she said. "They were worthless and I hated them."

"Not the one about Kibo," David said. "You loved Kibo. Don't you remember?"

"He had to go too. I was going to tear him out and keep (...)

(......)